We Need More than a "Network" To Fight the Corporate School Reformers

While I welcome the creation of Network for Public Education, and plan to join, we need to couple it with more radical initiatives that use strikes, boycotts, lawsuits and civil disobedience to challenge the testing, privatization and school closing agenda of the "School Reformers," and do grass roots organizing to demand greater community input into the shaping of school policies. While lobbying and research is important, only mass action can stop the School Reform train. Remember the lessons of the civil rights movement. Legal segregation wasn't finally overturned until people took to the streets, and flooded the jails, of Birmingham and Selma!